THE EARTH AN EVOLUTION 31 



could in that twilight age to explain to their 

 inquiring instincts the wilderness of phenomena 

 in which they found themselves. The universe is 

 a process. It is not petrified, but flowing. It is 

 going somewhere. Everything is changing and 

 evolving, and will always continue to do so. The 

 forms of life, of continents and oceans, and oi 

 streams and systems, which we perceive as we 

 open our senses upon the world to-day, are not 

 the forms that have always existed, and they are 

 not the forms of the eternal future. There was a 

 time, away in the inconceivable, when there was 

 no life upon the earth, no solids, and no seas. 

 The world was an incandescent lump, lifeless and 

 alone, in the cold solitudes of the spaces. There 

 was a time — there must have been a time — when 

 life appeared for the first time upon the earth, 

 simple cellules without bones or blood, and without 

 a suspicion of their immense and quarrelsome 

 posterity. There was a time when North America 

 was an island, and the Alleghany Mountains were 

 the only mountains of the continent. The time 

 was — in the coal-forming age — when the Missis- 

 sippi Valley, from the Colorado Islands to the Alle- 

 ghanies, was a vast marsh or sea, choked with 

 forests of equisetum and fern, and swarming with 

 gigantic reptiles now extinct. There was a time 

 when palms grew in Dakota, and magnolias waved 

 in the semi-tropical climate of Greenland and 

 Spitzbergen. There was a time when there were 

 no Rocky Mountains in existence, no Andes, no 

 Alps, no Pyrenees, and no Himahiyas. And that 



